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Related papers: Wasserstein Robust Reinforcement Learning

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We address the challenge of sequential data-driven decision-making under context distributional uncertainty. This problem arises in numerous real-world scenarios where the learner optimizes black-box objective functions in the presence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Francesco Micheli , Efe C. Balta , Anastasios Tsiamis , John Lygeros

A policy is said to be robust if it maximizes the reward while considering a bad, or even adversarial, model. In this work we formalize two new criteria of robustness to action uncertainty. Specifically, we consider two scenarios in which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-08 Chen Tessler , Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor

We present \textbf{FlowRL}, a novel framework for online reinforcement learning that integrates flow-based policy representation with Wasserstein-2-regularized optimization. We argue that in addition to training signals, enhancing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Lei Lv , Yunfei Li , Yu Luo , Fuchun Sun , Tao Kong , Jiafeng Xu , Xiao Ma

Off-policy evaluation and learning are concerned with assessing a given policy and learning an optimal policy from offline data without direct interaction with the environment. Often, the environment in which the data are collected differs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Yi Shen , Pan Xu , Michael M. Zavlanos

In federated learning, participating clients typically possess non-i.i.d. data, posing a significant challenge to generalization to unseen distributions. To address this, we propose a Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization scheme…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-06 Tung-Anh Nguyen , Tuan Dung Nguyen , Long Tan Le , Canh T. Dinh , Nguyen H. Tran

A wide array of machine learning problems are formulated as the minimization of the expectation of a convex loss function on some parameter space. Since the probability distribution of the data of interest is usually unknown, it is is often…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-27 Emilie Chouzenoux , Henri Gérard , Jean-Christophe Pesquet

We consider the problem of learning a control policy that is robust against the parameter mismatches between the training environment and testing environment. We formulate this as a distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Zaiyan Xu , Kishan Panaganti , Dileep Kalathil

Interest in derivative-free optimization (DFO) and "evolutionary strategies" (ES) has recently surged in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) community, with growing evidence that they can match state of the art methods for policy optimization…

Neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples and researchers have proposed many heuristic attack and defense mechanisms. We address this problem through the principled lens of distributionally robust optimization, which guarantees…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-05-04 Aman Sinha , Hongseok Namkoong , Riccardo Volpi , John Duchi

The performance of machine learning (ML) models critically depends on the quality and representativeness of the training data. In applications with multiple heterogeneous data generating sources, standard ML methods often learn spurious…

The goal of robust constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is to optimize an agent's performance under the worst-case model uncertainty while satisfying safety or resource constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate that strong duality does…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Shaocong Ma , Ziyi Chen , Yi Zhou , Heng Huang

We consider a distributionally robust second-order stochastic dominance constrained optimization problem. We require the dominance constraints hold with respect to all probability distributions in a Wasserstein ball centered at the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-20 Yu Mei , Jia Liu , Zhiping Chen

Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (WDRO) strengthens statistical learning under model uncertainty by minimizing the local worst-case risk within a prescribed ambiguity set. Although WDRO has been extensively studied in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-12 Changyu Liu , Yuling Jiao , Junhui Wang , Jian Huang

We show that several machine learning estimators, including square-root LASSO (Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection) and regularized logistic regression can be represented as solutions to distributionally robust optimization (DRO)…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-10-22 Jose Blanchet , Yang Kang , Karthyek Murthy

Most existing distance metric learning methods assume perfect side information that is usually given in pairwise or triplet constraints. Instead, in many real-world applications, the constraints are derived from side information, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-19 Kaizhu Huang , Rong Jin , Zenglin Xu , Cheng-Lin Liu

Reinforcement learning can provide effective reasoning for sequential decision-making problems with variable dynamics. Such reasoning in practical implementation, however, poses a persistent challenge in interpreting the reward function and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Yanran Wang , Qiuchen Qian , David Boyle

Designing optimal reward functions has been desired but extremely difficult in reinforcement learning (RL). When it comes to modern complex tasks, sophisticated reward functions are widely used to simplify policy learning yet even a tiny…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Ning Wei , Jiahua Liang , Di Xie , Shiliang Pu

Despite superior performance in many situations, deep neural networks are often vulnerable to adversarial examples and distribution shifts, limiting model generalization ability in real-world applications. To alleviate these problems,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-14 Hoang Phan , Trung Le , Trung Phung , Tuan Anh Bui , Nhat Ho , Dinh Phung

Safety is a primary concern when applying reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, especially in the presence of external disturbances. However, existing safe reinforcement learning algorithms rarely account for external…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-12 Zeyang Li , Chuxiong Hu , Shengbo Eben Li , Jia Cheng , Yunan Wang

This paper proposes a distributionally robust approach to logistic regression. We use the Wasserstein distance to construct a ball in the space of probability distributions centered at the uniform distribution on the training samples. If…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-12-02 Soroosh Shafieezadeh-Abadeh , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Daniel Kuhn